Joseph Gowan (1890 - 1976)

Refresh this page to see various historical events that occurred during Joseph's lifetime.

In 1890, in the year that Joseph Gowan was born, on January 2nd, Alice Sanger became the first female staffer to work in the White House. She was hired as a stenographer and, as such, took dictation.

In 1905, by the time he was just 15 years old, the German born physicist, Albert Einstein, proposed the Special Theory of Relativity: 1) that observers can never detect uniform motion except relative to other objects and that 2) unlike the velocity of massive objects, the speed of light is a constant and is the same for all observers independent of their constant velocity toward or away from the light source. Not such simple concepts that lead to the equation everyone now knows: E = mc2.

In 1923, he was 33 years old when on September 1, an earthquake - the Great Kanto earthquake - destroyed one-third of Tokyo. Measuring 7.9 and with a reported duration of between 4 and 10 minutes, casualties totaled about 142,800 deaths, including about 40,000 who went missing and were presumed dead.

In 1965, at the age of 75 years old, Joseph was alive when the television show "I Spy" premiered in the fall season on NBC. The stars were Bill Cosby and Robert Culp, making Cosby the first African American to headline a television show. Four stations - in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama - refused to air the show.

In 1976, in the year of Joseph Gowan's passing, The United States celebrated the Bicentennial of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. It was a year long celebration, with the biggest events taking place on July 4th.